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This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740-1940. By Elna C. Green. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. 356 pages. $54.95 hardcover, $22.95 paperback. Elna C. Green comments in the introduction of this work that the "new generation of social-welfare history, as rich as it is, has almost wholly ignored the U.S. South" (2). This Business of Relief fills a gap in the new, growing body of literature of social welfare history of the South. The book is a well-researched, comprehensive account of the history of social welfare of Richmond, Virginia, spanning some 200 years. Green argues that the public and private methods of poor relief in Richmond followed national trends with a few deviations. Perceptions about race, the experience of the Civil War, and the Lost Cause ideology shaped how Southerners perceived and cared for the poor differently than the rest of the country. The author also claims that the federal intervention during the New Deal finally ended the reliance on solely local and state governments in aiding the poor. Colonial Virginians brought from England the legal tradition of caring for the poor following the Elizabethan Poor law of 1601, which established several basic precedents in assisting indigents: responsibility for caring of paupers lay entirely with local governments, poor relief laws had residency requirements, and, finally, those on the dole were required to work for their keep. Two forms of aid emerged during the colonial period: outdoor and indoor relief. Outdoor relief refers to aid given to an individual in cash or resources outside a poorhouse. Indoor relief refers to aid given a pauper through institutionalization. Social welfare administration in Richmond also distinguished between "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. Green explains how the definition of those worthy of aid changed throughout the history of the region. Richmond began constructing its first poorhouse in 1805, following the antebellum national trend of institutionalizing the poor. Green argues that, by 1833, Richmond began cutting the funding of outdoor relief. Poor relief administrators viewed paupers who received outdoor relief as unworthy of aid and required them to go to the poorhouse. The Civil War brought new demands of public and private poor relief resources in Richmond. Standing at the geographic epicenter of the worst fighting of the war, Richmond suffered the worst from the social dislocation and shortages that engulfed the entire Confederacy by 1863. The city and state expanded outdoor relief efforts to meet the need for assistance, and the definition of the worthy poor became enmeshed in the Confederate war effort. Programs focused on assisting those "family of soldiers," and promotional literature linked assisting the poor with the survival of the Confederacy. Green also asserts that the Civil War enabled public poor relief efforts that superseded private benevolent efforts without "corrupting" the poor, thus laying the foundation for future state intervention. Reconstruction presented a lost opportunity for completely overhauling
the localism of Virginia's poor relief system. For the first time
in history, the federal government, led by the Freedmen's Bureau,
took responsibility for aiding indigent whites and blacks alike. The
author argues that the politics of racism soured the perspective of
white Virginians regarding federal government's intervention in assisting
the poor. The end of Reconstruction terminated the federal government's
brief stint in assisting the needy in Virginia. Three movements shaped relief efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the scientific charity organization movement, Lost Cause ideology, and progressivism. Progressivism and the charity organization mirrored national efforts to improve public life through governmental activism, private charity, and application of the latest scientific knowledge. The progressive era also signaled the decline of the poorhouse as the main public poor relief institution. The Great Depression and New Deal job and Social Security programs ended the localism of Virginia's public poor relief policy. Green gleans from a variety of rich archival resources from local,
state, and federal repositories such as poorhouse and Overseers of
the Poor Minutes, Freedmen's Bureau records, manuscript sources, newspapers,
and census schedules. Although she posits that the history of social
welfare in Virginia followed national trends, scholars need to examine
the rest of the South to ascertain how close public and private poor
relief efforts mirrored the rest of the country.
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